LinkedIn Creative Conceptual Redesign
Background
LinkedIn has established itself as one of the primary means for so many users to discover and apply to jobs. While LinkedIn remains a secure and promising resource for job-seekers, the way in which you’re allowed to present your work-self is still very much rooted in an older era of job searching. LinkedIn is essentially a dynamic, hyperlinked resume. As such, people in creative, technical, and craft-based industries are limited in the content they can showcase. Most often, these users will be forced to host any sort of visual, animated, or coded work on another website like a personal portfolio or Github Repository.
My team and I sought to tackle this problem and address the needs of the creatives, so that they would not have to completely resort to other means to display their creative work.
Role
UX Designer | UX Researcher
Team
Daniel Park
Timeline
October 2021 | 2-Week Sprint
Methods and Approach
User Research, Personas, Journey Mapping, Competitive Analysis, Feature Prioritization, Wireframing, Usability Testing, Prototyping, Mockups
The Problem
Linkedin does not provide many opportunities for creatives to display their work, and is essentially at its core a dynamic, hyperlinked resume. How can we create more tools for creatives to properly showcase their work, without having to completely rely on external sites?
01) User Research
Inside the Mind of Creatives
To begin our user research, my team and I sought to discover what creatives wanted to show about their work, what external websites they currently used, and any pain points that they had with LinkedIn in terms of displaying their work. To accomplish this, my team and I reached out to our own personal networks, which eventually gave us the opportunity to interview 6 creative professionals in a wide range of fields, including Photography, UX Design, and Software Development. We then syntheszied the information from our interviews into an affinity map, which helped us establish our three key findings.
Key Findings
01) Creatives want to showcase visual images of their work to be displayed first on their profile pages.
02) Creatives want their portfolio links to be more prominent on LinkedIn, as it is very easily hidden on their profiles.
03) Creatives want more control in how they categorize their work, using features like tags and filters to make their work more discoverable.
"LinkedIn could be better if they had projects up front instead of work and experience."
- Software Engineer
"I'm not satisfied with the current options I have to display my work on LinkedIn."
- UX Designer
Inside the Mind of Recruiters
Our team quickly discovered that it would be important to obtain insights from recruiters as well. Doing so would really help us understand some of their particular pain points as they discover creative talent. Since recruiters have to sort through so many candidates and their projects on LinkedIn, we figured that it would be wise to understand how they use LinkedIn and what they look for in a specific candidate. As a result, we scoured our networks once more and landed interviews with 2 Technical Recruiters, which really helped us get a better understanding of their perspectives.
Key Findings
01) Recruiters want consistent, discoverable placement of creatives work; they don't want to waste time they rarely have, as they have to sort through so many candidates.
02) Similar to the creatives, recruiters want greater control over how they categorize/filter work through features like tagging, in order to have an easier time discovering potential talent.
"I need an easier and quicker way to discover and search for peoples' projects on LinkedIn."
- Tech Recruiter
02) Define
Edgar & Misha
Using these key findings from our user interviews, my team and I defined two personas to reflect the needs and goals of creatives and recruiters, which represented our main core audience.
The Creative: Edgar
Edgar has a powerful creative portfolio on Square Space. In order to be noticed by recruiters for his dream job as Creative Director for a tech company, his portfolio needs to stand out on LinkedIn. LinkedIn's options for uploading and styling his pieces are sterile and rigid. His visual pieces are often obscured by text. He is unhappy with LinkedIn's ability to show case his work.
Goals
He wants to showcase his creative portfolio on LinkedIn and postion himself for roles like "Creative Director"
Needs
An intuitive, user-friendly way to upload high quality images of his work that allows him to tag his work in order for it to be more discoverable and viewable by other people, including recruiters.
The Recruiter: Misha
Misha is an experienced recruiter for advertising agencies in the NYC Metropolitan Area. She posts jobs on LinkedIn and gets tons of applications. However, LinkedIn's UI makes it difficult to view creatives' portfolios. She is frustrated and annoyed that something as simple as finidng a portfolio URL takes so much extra time, which she does not have a lot of, as she is always so busy.
Goals
To find the highest-quality creative professionals for her advertising agency in NYC
Needs
A quick and efficient, non-biased way to discover and preview portfolio work of creative individuals she finds, by using core features like tags, to help her discover talent and fill her staffing needs.
Journey Mapping
Furthermore, my team and I created retrospective journey maps to represent the current processess that Edgar and Misha currently undertake. This allowed us to more accurately define their current experience, allowing us to imagine, empathize, and hypothesize possible solutions at each step of their experience on LinkedIn. This also helped us begin to ideate opportunities where our team could come in to resolve their critical issues.
Edgar's Journey
Misha's Journey
03) Ideating
Competitive Analysis
We also wanted to see what other portfolio hosting sources did to see how each met the needs of their users, especially in terms of how they showed a creative’s work. This also helped us ideate for our redesign of the LinkedIn app. We specifically looked at the mobile apps for Behance and Squarespace, as they were some of the the most frequent tools mentioned by creatives in our user interviews.
Feature Prioritization
Once we had a general list of features that we brainstormed from our synthesis, we quickly realized that we had to scope out what we exactly wanted to acomplish within our timeframe, given the numerous features we hypothesized. To narrow down our project scope, we began to use the MoSCoW Method to further refine our proposed list and determine what we must, should, and could implement in our redesign to create our MVP, or minimum valuable product.
The Solution
Using the findings from our user research, including the information we gained from our personas and their respective journey maps, as well as the ideation from our feature prioritization and competitive/comparative analysis, we redesigned LinkedIn's current mobile app to address the needs of both creative professionals and recruiters. The updated app allows:
01) Creatives are able to upload and tag examples of their work through a user friendly process that positons their projects at the top of their profile page and allow their work to be more discoverable.
02) Recruiters will now be able to directly search examples of creative work through tags and filters, reducing the amount of time they have to spend searching through individual profiles.
04) Design
Redesigning the LinkedIn App
With our ideation complete, my team and I began to sketch and design wireframes of our proposed solutions. When creating our redesign for the LinkedIn mobile app, my team and I made sure to keep the needs of both the creatives and the recruiters, or in this case, the specific needs of our personas, Edgar and Misha, in mind when we began to design their particular user flow.
Key Design Focuses
01) A UI that prioritizes imagery and a low-effort, foolproof process for creatives to display their work.
02) Filters and tagging to help recruiters and creatives to better identify, catgorize, and discover creative work.
03) Obvious placement of images and links to ensure better discoverability.
For Edgar in particular, we focused on designing a set of wireframes that would allow him to display his past creative projects as well as upload a new project that he has just finished to his own LinkedIn profile.
For Misha, we designed wireframes that would allow her to search for projects based on tags, creative fields, and tools she wants to filter by. This also gives her the option to avoid any bias when she initially looks at a client, as she would primarily judge individuals based on their work first. We also wanted to give recruiters the ability to save any projects they want to view more in-depth, since they may not have time to do so while sorting through candidates they discover.
05) Testing
Iterating on Our Wireframes
Once our wireframes were complete, our team wanted to test our solution with users in order to discover what worked and didn't work as well. To accomplish this, we conducted usability testing with three individuals in order to observe how they interacted with our app and any problems they may have during their experience. We then made sure to compile and incorporate as much feedback as we could to iterate on our wireframes.
Adding a Search Bar
Since there were so many creative fields/tools to choose from, users noted that it might be difficult to scroll through all the options to find the desired fields.
As a result, we added a search bar to the top of the fields/tools selection page to facilitate the search process.
Clarifying the "Save" Action
Users often got lost when asked to add a particular project to a collection; they got confused by the button with a folder icon.
To resolve this confusion, we removed the obscure icon and added a more clear, actionable button labeled "Save."
Clarifying How to Start a Project
Users were confused when initially creating a project on what exactly what to do; they felt like the prompt given to add images from the camera roll was too vague.
We made the prompt to add images more specifc to give users more clear instructions and remove any confusion on how to proceed.
06) Prototype
High-Fidelity Prototype
With the feedback found from our usability testing integrated into our wireframes, we finally set out to create the high-fidelity prototype of our redesigned app to showcase how the flows for Edgar and Misha would look like once they were filled with color, images, and descriptive text.
Edgar's Flow: Uploading His Project
Misha's Flow: Finding a Creative
Reflection
Overall, this project taught me a lot about what it looks like to actually work in a design team, and how important communication and collaboration was to ensure a steady work pace throught out this two week sprint. I had a great time getting to know my fellow teammates, Matt and Lina, and throwing ideas back and forth with them. I'm glad that we were able to support each other through all the highs and lows we had together while working together, and tackle any blockers we had with constant communication, frutiful discussions and brainstorming.
I really do believe LinkedIn needs to do a better job in how they allow creators to display their own work, so devising a solution to this critical issue was something that I found great joy in. I believe that this conceptual redesign could serve as a momentous first step for creatives looking for jobs, whether it be in the field of UX, Computer Science, Art, etc. Knowing that this design could potentially help them in that aspect is something that I find very satisfying and rewarding.